Berlin: Urban gardening as marketing?

In case you hadn’t noticed that urban gardening has become a full-blown mainstream trend, I picked up some evidence while window-shopping in the trendy area of Berlin-Mitte around Alexanderplatz the other day.

What you see here are Deutsche Telekom flower seeds, a free gift for visitors to its “4010 shop.” This is a sort of concept store, an effort by Telekom to have a hip presence in a few happening neighborhoods. To quickly fill in those of you not from Germany, Telekom is the biggest and oldest telephone, internet and mobile service provider here. You might know the brand via its US subsidiary, T-Mobile. It has a rather plain, straightforward aura (although, inexplicably, its signature color is a flamboyant magenta). So it makes sense Telekom would try to get hip and connect with young people via a concept store and concept store concepts.

Well, one concept is apparently to jump on the urban gardening bandwagon. According to this article on the 4010 shop blog (in German), guerrilla gardening will be the big topic in the next 4010 magazine, arriving in spring. And though it’s still the middle of winter, a large planter box full of these seed packets beckons from the shop window. The label reads “For more color in the gray of everyday life – green your city!” And what color exactly? Well, all the packets contain the same thing: echinacea. In magenta, of course.